The Take (14 page)

She described the pressures from headquarters, and from her own divisional Superintendent. The never-ending demands to beat performance target after performance target. The blizzards of paperwork. The fact that no one really knew what their political masters were after. They claimed to have priorities, lots of priorities, but in the end you got to realise there were so many that absolutely nothing got to the top of the heap. When it came to working out what politicians wanted,
really
wanted, she’d finally sussed the truth: that they were all equally clueless.

‘None of that would matter,’ she continued, feeling herself getting wound up again, ‘if we were brave enough to ignore them. But no one ever does. Some twat in the Home Office has a bright idea on the seven thirty-three and within minutes we’re chasing around again. Some councillor from Paulsgrove writes to the paper and you’d think it was World War Three. It’s hard enough keeping up with the scrotes on the street, but I’m beginning to think the suits are even worse.’

Pete was down towards the bottom of his pint. In this mood he knew he’d only have to encourage Cathy with a nod or a frown and she’d bang on for ever. Instead, he changed the subject.

‘I was out of order,’ he said, ‘the other day.’

‘What?’

‘About this bloke Hennessey. Asking you to check him out for form.’

‘You’re
apologising
? I don’t believe it.’

Pete nodded. He’d pushed his luck as he always did, and now he wanted to say sorry. If she fancied another curry, it would be his pleasure. In the meantime, he was off to the bar for another couple of pints. As he began to get up, Cathy reached across, stopping him.

‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘Only, Faraday’s been on at me.’

‘About what?’

‘This Hennessey. How come the Gunwharf lot know so much about what happened at the Marriott?’

‘I told them. Paul told me and I passed it on.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s the deal. They’re paying me to try and find the bloke and I have to keep them briefed. It’s called money, Cath.’

‘And does Winter know that?’

‘Of course he does. It’s tit for tat. I feed him stuff, he feeds me. C’mon, Cath. This isn’t rocket science.’

‘Sure, but that doesn’t make it right, my love. They’ll crucify you if they find out.’

Pete smiled, amused by the concern in her voice, then departed to the bar, returning with another couple of pints. Cathy was still troubled by her ex-husband’s casual reliance on police resources and was determined to make him understand the kind of risks he was running, but what puzzled her just now was Winter. In the canteen, he’d had a vehemence about Hennessey she’d never seen before. Normally he was so laid back, so
cool
. Not this time.

‘So what do you think?’ She was frowning. ‘About this surgeon guy?’

Pete took the top off his pint and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘To be honest, I haven’t a clue. But I’ve read the cuttings, and incompetence would be a kind word.’

Twelve

Wednesday, 21 June, evening

Hating the silence of the bungalow, Winter went to the pub to read the file on Nikki McIntyre.

Her DOB, according to Hennessey’s own notes, was 23 September 1972, which made her twenty-seven. Over a period of seven years, Hennessey appeared to have operated on fifteen separate occasions, though the dividing line between examinations and some formal surgical procedure wasn’t altogether clear. Much of the medical jargon was impenetrable, offering no clue to the nature of Nikki’s condition, but what was obvious was her status as a patient. From the start, she’d opted to go private, drawing on an insurance scheme to pay Hennessey’s bills. The bulk of the work had been done at the Advent Hospital in South Kensington, and attached accounts had itemised the breakdown on each of the invoices Hennessey had sent to BUPA on her account over the course of their relationship.

Winter refuelled at the bar before returning to do the sums. Subtracting monies owed to the hospital for the hire of consulting rooms and an operating theatre, plus fees paid for anaesthetists, agency nursing staff and the hire of secretarial help, Winter was left looking at the figure which had accrued directly to Hennessey. Over the seven-year span, the surgeon had pocketed just under £40,000 for whatever damage he’d inflicted on Nikki McIntyre.

Winter sat back, gazing at the sum. It was enormous. It was the kind of money that would pay off his own mortgage with five grand to spare. It was a large enough figure maybe to have bought Joannie an extra year or two of time. There were wildly expensive drugs that could work that kind of miracle. Winter had read about them in Joannie’s copies of
Hello!
magazine. That’s how the super-rich kept their sleek figures and gleaming teeth. By buying a stake in immortality.

Returning to the notes, Winter did his best to tease a little sense from the entries in Nikki’s file, but even when he managed to get a fix on a word or two, or even a complete sentence, he was none the wiser. The terms used were hopelessly technical. You’d need a couple of years at medical school to stand a prayer with this lot.

Emptying his second pint, Winter was suddenly struck by another thought. So far, he’d somehow imagined that Hennessey’s career was well and truly over. Summoned before the GMC, and about to be pursued through the courts, the man had doubtless done the sensible thing and retired. Given earnings like these, he’d have stashed a pile in some offshore, tax-free account and – if he was still alive – would by now be planning a new life abroad.

His recent visit to the Marriott may have been a preparation for that. He’d have bits and pieces to tidy up. He’d have a house to sell, the New Forest cottage to vacate, other assets to turn into hard cash. Somewhere along the line, his past had caught up with him in the shape of the other figure in the video surveillance tapes, and in his heart Winter was sure that Hennessey was already dead. But say he wasn’t? Say he’d somehow survived the attentions of the looming stranger in the suede jacket? Say he was still out there with his scalpel and his stethoscope, the freelance butcher of every woman’s worst nightmare? Say, God help us, he was planning
more
operations?

Winter grunted to himself, then checked his watch. Motivation in the job had never been a problem with him. He went after criminals the way you’d do something about a bad smell. It was instinctive. It was necessary. But this was something special, an inquiry that personal catastrophe had turned into a near obsession. Whatever happened, dead or alive, he had to find Hennessey. Just to get his own back on life. He was still a copper, for fuck’s sake. He could still bait traps, match motive to opportunity, back the bad guys into a corner and watch them destroy themselves. That’s what two decades of CID work had taught him. They were the craft skills he took from job to job. There’d never been a situation he hadn’t turned to his own advantage. Never.

Outside, in the car park, he phoned Nikki McIntyre’s number on his mobile. At length, a male voice replied.

‘Captain McIntyre. How can I help you?’

There was an edge of impatience in the question. It was getting late. There was an etiquette here, unspoken rules. Winter explained his interest. He was investigating the disappearance of a man called Hennessey. He had some questions to ask Nikki McIntyre. Where might he find her?

‘You won’t,’ the voice said. ‘Talk to me instead.’

‘About Hennessey?’

‘Indeed. You’re a policeman, you say?’

‘A detective. CID.’

‘Excellent. Nothing will give me greater pleasure.’

*

Faraday sat in the restaurant, towards one end of the long table, slowly getting drunk. Conversation ebbed and flowed around him, little eddies of gossip and laughter, and he let himself float along, not really caring where the evening led. For once, he was well and truly off the leash.

He’d been attending the French language course all year, ten months of Wednesday evenings out at the city’s sixth-form college, barely a mile from where he lived. He’d signed up for a good practical purpose: to improve what little French he possessed to the point where he could visit his son in Caen and risk a conversation with the woman he now showed every sign of wanting to marry. Communicating with J-J himself had never been a problem. Sign language, plus a private vocabulary of deeply personal gestures, had proved flexible enough to cope with anything they’d ever wanted to say. But talking to Valerie was an altogether trickier proposition. She’d learned enough sign to get through to J-J, but her English was far from perfect and she had a natural reluctance to risk much of her real self in a language she didn’t really understand. Up to Faraday, then, to meet her at least halfway.

He seized a new bottle of red wine and began to replenish the glasses around him. He’d started the evening classes with some misgivings, not at all sure that he’d be able to cope, but to his surprise he’d felt immediately at home with the mixed bag of largely mature students who’d also turned up. The job rarely lent itself to excursions like these, uncontaminated by the demands of a particular inquiry or investigation, and he’d found himself relishing the chance to plunge into other people’s worlds on the basis of nothing more than a shared adventure.

There was a guy who restored furniture for a living, over in Hayling Island, and made frequent trips to France to buy various bits and pieces in village auctions. Another bloke was a motor mechanic who wanted to jack it all in and swap his lock-up behind Fratton Road for some tumbledown ruin in Normandy. A third student, a woman this time, had a lifetime’s ambition to read
Madame Bovary
in the original French. They were all friendly, all good fun, all down-to-earth, and their lives took place way outside that circle of wagons Faraday and his colleagues drew up around themselves. Within a month or so, Faraday had found himself looking forward to Wednesday evenings. By Christmas, these people all felt like good friends.

‘
Encore du vin?
’

‘
Bien sûr. Pourquoi pas?
’

There was something else, too, that had come as no less of a surprise. Far from being intimidated by the challenge of French, Faraday had positively revelled in it. He loved its subtlety and its strangeness in his mouth. He loved the precision with which the course tutor, herself French, insisted it be used. And most of all he loved the linguistic jigsaws he was slowly able to put together, not just shop-dialogue or the kind of French you used on a waiter, but oral descriptions of places he loved, of things that moved him and, of course, of birds.
Rossignol
was absolutely perfect for the nightingale. Just the sound of the word would send him to sleep with a smile on his face.

Month by month, his fascination for the language had grown. For Christmas, Ruth had bought him a serious dictionary. By February, he’d been turning out half-decent pieces of written work. He still wasn’t quite ready to tackle Valerie, but the gradual discovery of the pleasures that awaited him at the end of the hard grammatical slog was a constant incentive to learn more. He was used to piecing together jigsaws. That was what detection was about. But the difference with French was the places it took you, the destinations that beckoned. A decent bit of detective work would often leave you in the heart of darkness. French, on the other hand, seemed flooded with light.

In the restaurant, Faraday was seated opposite a Spanish woman, Marta. She’d confessed from the start that her interest in French was purely social, a way of getting to meet new people in a city that could be tough going for outsiders, and she’d made no secret that she fancied Faraday.

She was a vivid, good-looking woman in her late thirties with a wonderfully stylish dress sense, and the social arabesques she wove had become the talk of the class. She was always the one to suggest a drink in the pub after Wednesday classes, just to unwind, and when one or two of the married men mistook her flashing eyes for a come-on, Faraday had been fascinated by the ease with which she played them. To his near certain knowledge, no one had laid a finger on her. Yet at least three members of the class, none of them stupid, were convinced she was besotted by them. It was a game at which she excelled, and part of her charm was the fact that it remained so totally innocent. Faraday knew this because she’d told him. Married men, she said, just weren’t her style. Faraday, whom she’d ringed as single, most definitely was.

The meal broke up around eleven. There’d been the usual swapping of addresses and talk of a class reunion as soon as the summer was over, but now the crowd had melted away, leaving Faraday at the kerbside, looking vaguely for a cab. One sped past on the other side of the road, ignoring his outstretched hand, and he was on the point of using his mobile when a car drew up beside him. He recognised the low shape of the Alfa Romeo. It was Marta’s.

She lowered the window on the passenger side and leaned across.

‘Get in.’

Faraday did what he was told. The inside of the car smelled exotic. Leather and a perfume so subtle it had to cost the earth.

‘How much have you had to drink, then?’ he asked her.

‘Very little. I don’t need drink.’

It was true. Faraday had watched her in the pub. Most nights she limited herself to a single glass of wine, a sip at a time.

‘I’m pissed,’ he announced. ‘My apologies in advance.’

He looked across at her for a moment, realising what he’d said, then started laughing. The laughter lasted the length of Copnor Road.

‘Did I really say that?’ he kept asking her. ‘Was that really me?’

She just grinned back. She wanted to know where he lived. She needed directions.

‘By the water,’ he said, ‘I live by the water. With the birds.’

‘
Comment?
’

‘
Les oiseaux. Partout
.’

‘
C’est vrai?
’

‘
Oui. Absolument
.’

She glanced across at him. She’d glimpsed the blackness of the harbour beyond the end of the road. They were nearly there.

‘I like you drunk,’ she said. ‘Even more.’

She parked outside the house, looking up at the stars and taking deep lungfuls of the warm night air. Faraday was having difficulty with the front-door key. After a while, he felt a hand on his.

‘Here,’ she said.

The door opened. By the time his hand found the light switch, she’d shut the door. Hearing the sound of the bolt sliding across, he looked at her with some surprise.

‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Why not?’

She led the way upstairs, pausing to look at each of Janna’s photos in the spill of light from the hall.

‘Who took these?’

‘My wife. A long time ago.’

‘You’re divorced?’

Faraday shook his head. ‘She died.’

They were on the top landing now. Marta found another light. The door was open to Faraday’s bedroom, but she moistened a finger and held it to his lips.

‘A moment,’ she said.

Faraday got undressed, holding onto the corner of the wardrobe for support. Down to his pants, he felt the light press of her body behind him. He turned round. She was naked. She kissed him softly, then sank to her knees, slipping his pants off, smiling up at him.

‘In France they do this first.’

Much later, waking up again, Faraday remembered the videos he’d watched, the stuff that Addison put together, and he bent over Marta, trying to rouse her with a whisper. She’d wanted to know what pleased him, what turned him on, which way he fancied next, and she’d brought a frankness and a sense of wild abandon to his bed that he’d never once managed with Ruth. There was nothing this woman wouldn’t do, literally nothing, and what made it all the more enticing was the fact that she so obviously enjoyed the role she’d cast for herself.

She awoke with a tiny start, her big brown eyes staring up at him. When he explained a second time, she nodded, her teeth white in the darkness.

‘Why not?’ she murmured.

Dawn Ellis was asleep when her mobile began to ring. She rolled over, fumbling among the debris on the carpet beside the bed. According to the big alarm clock, it was 0248. Shit, she thought. Night call-out.

‘Yes?’

It was a voice she dimly recognised, a male voice, very Pompey. He spoke slowly, spelling it out. He had a proposition to put to her. It was a proposition that she’d find incredibly attractive, a proposition that might put a lot of money her way.

Dawn was up on one elbow now. Jimmy’s, she thought. The guy with the dangly little number nine.

‘What is it? This proposition?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘We are talking.’

‘Face to face, I mean. Ring me tomorrow.’

He gave her a number. She was to call him in the morning, any time, and they’d fix to meet. His place or hers, he didn’t care. He had nothing to hide. All he was offering was a chance to better herself.

‘Know what I mean?’

Dawn was still looking for a pen. Bastard things were never there when you needed them. Finally, she found the stub of a pencil.

‘Just give me that number again,’ she murmured. ‘I missed it.’